Affect in SERPs when moving footer links off the homepage

[braunna]

I have several pages that rank highly in the SERPs and these pages are linked directly to my homepage in the footer. I want to clean up my footer because I have too many site wide links but don't want to hurt the SERP rankings during the transition. Will removing these page links from the footer impact SERP rankings?

[MoosaHemani]

If the links in the footer of the website are of the same websites (internal pages) then removing them from the footer (as per my personal experience) will cause ranking fluctuation ...I am not sure why you are removing it but if it is because you want to stay away from the penalty caused by site wide links then IMPO with internal pages this won’t be a problem...

If you really want to remove the link from the footer the best idea is to remove the links one by one and see the impact of it on SERP rankings overall...

[DougRoberts]

What links do you need in your footer?

The importance of these pages isn't just their ranking position, but also the traffic that they are getting, and the conversion rate (how qualified are the visitors?)

I would audit your content and find out what pages really matter to you and then, if you really need to, remove the links to the pages that aren't of any commercial value and question if you actually need those pages at all.

Can you consolidate content onto one page (for example combining any lega/privacy policy/terms of service content onto one page)

Are any of the pages in your footer also linked in your main navigation? If so then you can probably remove them from the footer without affecting too much. I would add a word of caution through - if you've got lengthy content and visitors (the real human beings) are using the footer to find their way about then it's going to affect usability.

Removing links from a page passing lots of link equity then you are going to weaken the target page - if you've got loads of links on your home page and you prune some of the zero value pages you may find that you're passing more equity to your important pages.

As Moosa suggests, if you want to do some housekeeping, reduce the risk by making small changes and testing.

[braunna]

Thank you Moosa and Doug - your answers were very thoughtful and helpful!

Do you believe that reducing the # of footer links will have a positive impact by providing additional link juice to the important pages that I keep?